Disenchanted Mormonism: Practicing a Rooted Religion

Rosalynde Welch

I. The Disenchanted Forest

Thirty-nine years ago this summer my parents attended the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They watched a production of “As You Like It,” Shakespeare’s comedy of love and transformation set in the enchanted Forest of Arden. One year later, my mother gave birth to their first child, a daughter whom they named Rosalynde after the clever, independent heroine they had met onstage. Shakespeare’s Rosalind and her beloved Orlando are the dazzling romantic leads of the play, but — if you’ll forgive the cliche — the most important character in the story isn’t a person at all, but a place: The Forest of Arden.

The Forest is a realm of simplicity, harmony, and above all enchantment. Early lore about the Forest of Arden included enchanted rings and fountains. In Shakespeare’s hands, the Forest is not so much the realm of spirits as it is the realm of the spiritual: every experience is more vivid, every word filled with significance and promise and the felt presence of a kindly intelligence guiding the action. As one character puts it:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.1

In the Forest, every sapling and stone radiates a spiritual significance. Every perception, every sensation — even a biting winter wind — can be made to yield a deeper meaning, if one is attuned to its whisper. These winter winds, the same character says, “are counsellors / That feelingly persuade me what I am.”2 The Forest of Arden is an otherworld, a place of spiritual awakening where one sees beyond the surface of things to discover truer identities and relationships.

I inherited Rosalind’s name. I did not inherit her place in the enchanted otherworld. The world I perceive most immediately does not shimmer with significance; unseen messengers do not whisper to me from trees and streams. The world I inhabit at the most intuitive level is good, but it is not shared with spirits nor does it intimate a spiritual realm before and beyond. This is not to say that these spirits and these lives are not real; the texts and prophets I affirm as holy, not to mention the combined witness of millions, promise that they are. (Let me emphasize: I am not saying that they are not real.) But the most basic spiritual experience — a sense of this life as a window to an ineffable order beyond — is not given to me. The veil is thick for this Rosalynde.

I titled my remarks “Disenchanted Mormonism.” This is a bit of wordplay. I am not a disenchanted Mormon; on the contrary, I’m Mormon to the bone and have been shaped by LDS teachings in every particular. Nor am I disenchanted with Mormonism; relationship to the church and its culture is my anchor. But I am interested in thinking about a “disenchanted Mormonism” — that is, a way of living as an engaged Latter-day Saint even if one lacks a strong spiritual sensibility, as I do. For me and others like me, does the Church offer a nourishing home?

I’m loosely borrowing the term “disenchantment” here from the work of German sociologist Max Weber, who uses the term to describe the process of secularization that seemed, for a time in the 20th century, the inevitable sequel to modernity.3 But I am not using disenchantment” in this strict sociological sense. In fact, I am brazenly re-purposing the idea to describe something very different: a personal state, a particular way of perceiving the world and a particular way of interpreting those perceptions.

One aim of my talk today is simply to identify and describe this condition I’m calling “disenchantment.” I use my own experience as a reference point not because I assume that this audience is personally interested in me, but because my own is the worldview I know best. My perceptions may not match yours; indeed, they will probably only resonate among a minority of Latter-day Saints. Nevertheless, I hope my remarks will be relevant to that minority and interesting, if nothing else, to the rest.

Otherworldly spiritual emotion, flashes of intuited spiritual knowledge, deeply sensed connections to spirits and their world, conviction that prayers are heard and answered, euphoric moments of confirmation — these have been rare experiences in what has nevertheless been my deeply meaningful path through Mormonism. It’s not so much that I don’t “feel the Spirit,” to use our typical LDS phrase. Occasionally I do experience the chills, rushing emotion, and overflow of joy that characterize present-day LDS spirituality. For me, however, these sensations do not self-interpret at manifestations of the Spirit. When I recover a lost set of keys, my first thought is “Oh, that was lucky!”; not “I am so grateful that a Father in Heaven is aware of me.” A mountain hike prompts the perception “The world is extravagantly beautiful, and I belong to it”; not “A loving Heavenly Father created this for me.” When I hold my newborn, I feel “There is nothing more precious and exquisite”; not “God gave me this child.” In other words, my immediate perceptions give me a world that is often beautiful, often good, and always home. They do not, however, give me an everyday life into which an otherworld — the realm of God’s intervening presence — is spiritually infused.

I am sustained by what we might call “this-worldly” religion, religion rooted in what’s given to the present. The loving community I’ve found in my wards and my family, opportunities to serve and be served, the consecrated ideal of building Zion, the comforting warmth of religious ritual, rooted connection to family and church histories. Some of my most powerful religious experiences have come while singing congregational hymns, no doubt much too slowly; while sitting quietly in a Portuguese hovel with a sister incapacitated by stroke and unable to speak; while watching an amateur theatrical in the cultural hall at a Saturday morning ward Christmas party. You might say, inverting the typical formulation, that I am religious but not spiritual: I am drawn to the communal structure of religious tradition and practice, but I lack strong spiritual perception.

My intention is not to justify this particular way of being in the world. I don’t know why this has been my experience. I was raised by wonderful parents in an active and loving LDS home; I went to BYU, served a mission, married in the temple, and have served actively and raised my four kids in the church. I was enculturated into Mormonism in an entirely typical way. Perhaps some combination of my innate temperament, the habits of mind I acquired in higher education, or my life experience has closed off the emotional channels through which otherworldly perception travels.

It may be that I have failed to train my spiritual perception properly. I attempt to redress this possible failure by receiving others’ spiritual experiences with all of the respect and sympathy I have. I am open to the possibility that my spiritual capacities have not yet matured, and I live in hope that they may someday do so. Perhaps my gifts of the spirit lie elsewhere. In general, though, I don’t dwell on these questions of psychology, which rarely yield definitive answers. I concentrate instead on understanding how I can live meaningfully in a disenchanted forest.

II. Spiritual But Not Religious

It’s not obvious at first glance that my way of being makes sense. Spiritual experience has always been the heart of religion. William James, describing his monumental effort to distil the essence of religious experience, wrote that:

The mother sea and fountain head of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual[.] … We are thus made convincingly aware of the presence of a sphere of life larger and more powerful than our usual consciousness, with which the latter is nevertheless continuous. The impressions and impulsions and emotions and excitements which we thence receive help us to live, they found the invincible assurance of a world beyond the senses, they melt our hearts and communicate significance and value to everything and make us happy.4

For James, dogma and moral strictures are secondary elements of religion. Its primary and sustaining feature is the personal, experiential journey through the enchanted forest — alive with mystical messages, thinly veiled from the otherworld of spirits, promising a reality beyond our senses with which we can be ineffably united.

James’s insight suggests why, for early Latter-day Saints, charismatic spiritual manifestations such as pentecostal speaking in tongues — so foreign to our modern sensibilities — were central to religious practice. James can help us understand why the eccentric spiritual manifestations described in the Book of Mormon, particularly fainting as if dead, feature so prominently in accounts of Nephite religion and conversion. Through this lens, the heart of modern Latter-day Saint experience lies in personal encounter with the Spirit: in spiritual knowledge intuited during meditative study; in the spiritual emotion of a testimony meeting; in the spiritual conviction of an answered prayer; in the spiritual presence of loving ancestors.

If institutional religion and spiritual experience have always been connected, they have also always been separable. Many of the religious upheavals that have shaped the West’s passage into modernity orbit the question of whether or not spirituality must be housed within an institutional religion. One project of the Reformation was to move the individual’s encounter with God out of the confessional and into the private closet — out, that is, of the institutional church’s exclusive authority and into the emerging authority of the private conscience. Mary Sidney, a 16th-century English Protestant, paraphrased lines from Psalm 139:

O Lord in me there lieth nought,
but to the search revealed lies:
for when I sitt
thou markest it:
no lesse thou notest when I rise:
yea closest clossett of my thought
hath open windowes to thine eyes.5

Mary Sidney relocates spiritual encounter from the chapel to the “closest closet of thought”, as it were. Her Psalms record the long ascent of the individual mind as the privileged seat of “authentic” spirituality, and the long divorce of spirituality and religiosity in Western culture.

That long divorce is ongoing. Last year the Pew Research Forum made headlines with its findings on the rise in religiously unaffiliated individuals, now just under 20% of all American adults. What is striking about the finding, among other things, is how many of these people still consider themselves to be spiritual seekers:

[M]any of the country’s 46 million unaffiliated adults are religious or spiritual in some way. Two-thirds of them say they believe in God (68%). More than half say they often feel a deep connection with nature and the earth (58%), while more than a third classify themselves as “spiritual” but not “religious” (37%), and one-in-five (21%) say they pray every day.6

These “spiritual but not religious” seekers are following to its logical end the path marked by Mary Sidney and others. Institutional religion is now understood to be not only insufficient for authentic spiritual encounter, but unnecessary. Wandering in enchanted forests is often best done alone, after all. If James was right, and religious dogma and authority have always been secondary features of religious experience, then perhaps these “unaffiliateds” have not in fact abandoned religion but have merely stripped it down to its purest psychological form.

The movement away from organized religion hasn’t been all bad. The Restoration itself began at a waystation along this path. If young Joseph had not believed that the authority to adjudicate dogma and reject clerical authority was legitimately his own, he may never have made his way into the enchanted hardwood forest that Latter-day Saints know as the Sacred Grove. Joseph’s First Vision embodies the Jamesian notion that the “the fountain head of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual.” Joseph himself, it turns out, was for a time “spiritual but not religious.”

All this has been to concede that the path out of religion and into an individualistic spirituality is in fact a well-worn highway, with its own logic and utility, and thus to set up my primary question: what sense, then, can we make of a U-turn on this highway? What are we to make of “religious but not spiritual”? What of a congregant like me who, for whatever reason, has limited access to personal spirituality? Are the dogma, hierarchy, pageantry, and communal morality of religion enough to create meaningful experience, without recourse to spiritual perception?

The question is acute for Latter-day Saints. One cannot understand the Restoration without grasping the intensity of Joseph’s exchange with the world of spirits, what Terryl Givens has called “dialogic revelation.”7 Joseph drew back the curtains of consciousness that flank birth and death to reveal spirit worlds in the very image of our own. The conviction that our lives and relationships will survive death through the atonement of Christ, will persist intact in other worlds, forms the core of his “invincible assurance of a world beyond the senses.” How is a Latter-day Saint with limited access to these spiritual dimensions to find meaning in our deeply spiritualistic practices and teachings?

Notice that I do not frame the question as “why”: why would such a Latter-day Saint choose to stay, for instance? A number of answers to that particular question immediately spring to mind, most of them fairly quotidian: she might stay to preserve family relationships or status in the community; she might enjoy the practical benefits of a close knit community; she might stay out of sentimental affection for or deep identification with Mormon culture; she might stay on the basis of hope in or respect for Restoration teachings or scripture or history.

I stay for all of these reasons, but ultimately I do not dwell on this kind of reason-seeking. I am skeptical of my ability to retrieve my true motivation from deep psychological recesses; I’m not even sure what “true” motivation is. I simply know that I belong to the Restoration, that it claims me as its child. I am a member of the church in the thickest sense of “membership,” in the sense that the novelist Wendell Berry uses the word. For Berry, membership in a community is not a lifestyle choice or even a deliberately assumed identity; it is not a choice at all. It is a given. One of his characters says: “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”8 I am a member, and I know it.

The live question for me, then, is not why stay but how. Let me offer one more caveat before I tackle the question itself. I’m asking a “how” question, but I’m not offering a “how-to.” I do not consider myself a guru or a guide, and I offer these thoughts as nothing more than personal rumination. I will be pleased if they stimulate reflection and discussion, but I do not intend them to be a practical faith-rescue program.

III The New Paradigm of Doubt

One way to interpret my condition of disenchantment is as an extended episode of doubt.The world of spirit is not open to me, so I might conclude that it doesn’t exist at all. Perhaps I have built my life on illusion and am teaching my children fairy tales. Doubt, under this paradigm, is the remainder of a fractured certainty, and that fracture is experienced as an emotional, epistemological, and existential crisis. As doubt, the disenchanted forest gives way to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a the scene of perplexity and alienation that remains when faith recedes like a tide.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.9

This is a bleak place to be, to be sure. There is always pain in crisis. Yet there has probably never been a better time than the present to be a doubting Mormon: doubt is having a Mormon moment, in conference, in firesides, in blogs, in the New York Times. Whereas expressions of spiritual uncertainty in official LDS discourse have been uncommon, we have recently seen a lifting of the taboo. Elder Holland, in the April 2013 General Conference, gave permission to “Be as candid about your questions as you need to be; life is full of them on one subject or another.”10 Elder Holland’s address stops short of fully accepting doubt as an element of discipleship, but it nevertheless marks a shift in tone.

This shift responds to a larger current in LDS culture toward what we might call a redemptive model of doubt. Reacting to the electronic dissemination of controversial church history and anti-Mormon treatments of such, as well as to the wider anti-religion project of the new atheism; drawing implicitly on the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard and his disciples; developed among LDS thinkers in the Mormon tradition of personal essay and, recently, in countless blog posts; this redemptive model of doubt finds its most articulate expositor in Terryl Givens. Givens frames uncertainty as a form of epistemological freedom, and faith as the redemptive choice to believe in the face of this uncertainty. Thus doubt becomes the midwife of a morally significant, because freely chosen, faith. He writes:

I am convinced that there must be grounds for doubt as well as belief in order to render the choice more truly a choice—and, therefore, the more deliberate and laden with personal vulnerability and investment. … One is, it would seem, always provided with sufficient materials out of which to fashion a life of credible conviction or dismissive denial. We are acted upon, in other words, by appeals to our personal values, our yearnings, our fears, our appetites, and our egos. What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love. That is why faith, the choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance.11

There is a three-part paradigm at work here: first, doubt reaches a crisis point in which certainty dissolves; next, the doubter finds herself in a state of radical freedom, suspended between equally-justifiable states of belief or denial; and finally, she chooses belief, on the basis of a will informed by her deepest personal nature. This is an extremely powerful formulation. Crisis, freedom and choice are accessible, empowering concepts for the modern believer. Givens is to be praised and thanked for neutralizing the shame surrounding “proximate” or “provisional” doubt. It must be noted that, while he does not spell it out fully, the logic of his argument requires that ultimate doubt, doubt that never resolves into freely chosen belief, can only be understood as sin. Nevertheless, I find Givens’s new paradigm of doubt to be elegant, compassionate and energizing, an important addition to LDS thought. (Not that he was waiting for my endorsement!)

Yet Givens’s paradigm has never seemed to fit my personal experience. I am not prone to crises, for one thing, whether spiritual or emotional or any other kind. My sojourn in the disenchanted forest, when considered by my own lights and on the basis of my own instincts, has never felt like a crisis. I have rarely felt suspended or stranded on the knife edge between belief or denial. Instead of feeling torn between binary possibilities, I have simply felt that I was given a different kind of world. The language of “faith crisis” or “faith transition” can offer an appealing structure to the experience of uncertainty, but that framework, I’ve always sensed, is external to my proper experience.

The encounter with uncertainty is a complex experience, and we should resist the impulse to triage and label. I know that there are many Saints, no doubt many in this room, who experience genuine rupture and transformation in their faith, and for them the faith crisis paradigm is a lifeline. I suspect there are others like me for whom the paradigm does not precisely fit, but who nevertheless begin to interpret their experience in terms of crisis simply because that is the available language. The language of faith crisis thus “overdetermines” the experience of uncertainty, to borrow a term from critical theory: the crisis is prompted partly by an authentic personal turmoil, yes, but also by the available rhetorical frame and by the circulation of that frame in personal narrative. Ironically, the crisis formulation, in casting uncertainty as an acute episode to be resolved rather than a long-term condition to be lived in, may best serve the perspective of those who have already found certainty, in or out of the church, and who naturally want others to cast their lot with them.

Furthermore, freedom and choice, central to the new paradigm of redemptive doubt, do not strike me as inherently privileged categories. That is to say, the freely (or mostly free) choosing self seems to me not an end to be sought, but rather a necessary means to a much greater and more difficult end: awareness of our own limitation, obligation, dependence, and incompleteness, what King Benjamin called our “nothingness.”12 Mormon scripture offers at least two accounts of personhood, one emphasizing the sufficiency of our eternal natures as autonomous, choosing co-intelligences with God, and the other emphasizing our eternal involvement with and obligation to one another, and thus the insufficiency of the single choosing self. It is the latter account that grips me. Perhaps it is for this reason that the notion of a “chosen belief” — a belief we embrace as an affirmation of the truest self — does not resonate with my experience. The ideas and people that have most deeply shaped me as a person, my family and my religion, were not chosen. They were bequeathed to me first as accidents of circumstance and nature, but over time they have captured me at a level beyond conscious choice. I resonate to John Donne, minus the melodrama, in his Holy Sonnet:

I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue. …
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free[.]13

IV Puzzle, Attend, Observe

For a sojourner in the disenchanted forest, then, what language might better serve that experience than the trio of doubt, freedom and choice? It would be difficult to match the elegance and appeal of that formulation, and I freely concede that I will fail to do so here. Nevertheless, I’ll propose in conclusion an alternative sequence of keywords that I hope will begin to describe another route through a disenchanted Mormonism.

My experience has not been one of conventional religious doubt, an agonizing knife-edge demanding resolution through insight or decision, but rather one of puzzlement. Puzzlement is a gentler and more sustainable state of mind. It entails patience, an internal stillness, and an acknowledgement of my own failure to wring answers from an inscrutable world. Puzzlement implies humility. If provisional doubt must be mastered by individual judgment and choice, then puzzlement marks the limits of our intellectual and moral mastery.

Moreover, the notion of puzzlement allows us to uncouple belief from faith, and faith from choice, in the troubling but inescapable logic of doubt. Puzzlement allows us to think of faith not as a moral victory over uncertainty but rather as an encounter with uncertainty itself, which is to say an encounter with the limits of our own capacity to comprehend or control the world. When we encounter church doctrines or practices that we fail to understand or can’t justify, or when we taste suffering in our own lives or the lives of those we love, we find ourselves puzzled by God’s will. These moments of hesitation become the personal occasions of faith. They originate not in our capacity to choose, in our strength of will, but on the contrary in our own limitations of mind, in our insufficiency to comprehend or our present inability to decide. Faith begins at the moment we say “I don’t understand.” Faith here is not a choice to believe but choice’s opposite, born in a moment of spiritual hesitation or aporia; not first a triumph of the moral mind, but its fortunate failure.

Puzzlement primes us not to know or decide or choose, but simply to attend to experience as it comes. We “attend” not merely in the sense of showing up, as in attending sacrament meeting week after week, though that is a necessary pre-condition for real attention. I mean attend in all of its senses at once: to accompany, to care for, to serve, to pay attention, to notice. Puzzlement leaves us not in a state of heightened freedom, but in a state of heightened attention. The stones in the disenchanted forest may be only stones, no sermons attached, but stones themselves richly repay our focused attention. Whether or not one experiences Latter-day Saint practice as suffused with spiritual presence, one can make oneself fully present in the practice.

From this state of quiet attention to what is given, one is prepared to observe. To observe a religious practice is first simply to see it, to hold it in sustained view. Beyond that, to observe a practice is to adopt it, to adhere to it. But what value lies in religious observation without an undergirding spiritual meaning? Some religious practices are inherently rewarding: celebrating holidays or meditating, for example. Some rules, without an infused spirituality, can feel arbitrary and limiting. If for example I find fasting to be a physically taxing practice without discernible spiritual rewards, why should I observe fast Sundays with my congregation?

This might appear to be the end of the road for the “religious but not spiritual”: without the conviction that spiritual rewards will follow the difficult or arbitrary aspects of religious observance, religion could become nothing more than a collection of folkways to be sorted through, on a hunt for the good ones. But I am convinced that, on the contrary, one gift of religion to the disenchanted lies precisely in observing unchosen rules, and here is why. For otherworldly souls, intense spiritual experience momentarily dissolves the conscious, separate self and reveals the connected structure of creation. For those of us to whom that experience is not often given, obedience can work in the same way. When I observe a religious practice like fasting, I momentarily de-throne the sovereign self, the self that would move from moment to moment merely on whim or appetite or preference. In turn, the knowledge that I am sharing the experience with my covenant tribe gives me a feeling of commonality, connectedness, embeddedness. The connected structure of creation is momentarily laid bare.

Rules that limit choice, even when the choices they limit are otherwise morally neutral, tame the ego, force us to accept experience as it comes to us rather than as we wish it were. Observing rules merely for the sake of the observation itself is a valuable ascetic practice. This kind of whole-soul attention-giving is at once a basic and an utterly unnatural human capacity: prone to wander, the spirit wants to leap backward into regret and obsession or forward into fantasy and desire. To observe is to hold the soul in the now, to train our thoughts and actions on the social forms unfolding before us in time. Religious practice and its secular cousin the folkway offer us the forms to hold in our view.

V The Road to Emmaus

To conclude, I want to turn for a moment to the New Testament. We moderns find in the New Testament two narratives for dealing with religious doubt. One is the apostle Thomas, who, to modern readers, seems to seek an empirical basis for belief and, in its absence, succumbs to doubt. The other is the frantic father of an ailing child who acknowledges his failure of faith even as he desperately confesses his desire to believe: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”14

Both of these stories move me. But there is a third New Testament narrative that captures my experience more fully. It is the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is not the big reveal at the end that thrills me, the re-enchantment they experience when their spiritual perception is awakened and they re-interpret their experience from a new perspective: “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way?”15 I try to maintain a mind and heart open to this kind of re-enchantment, and I live in hope that it may someday be given to me.

For now I live on the road to Emmaus, and it is a good place to walk. The two disciples, confronted with unreconcilable realities — that Jesus is the redeemer of Israel, and that Jesus is dead — find themselves at the end of their own ability to know. Denied for a time the spiritual sensibility that transcends apparent contradiction, they instead simply observe the here and now, without leaping ahead to ultimate otherworldly answers. They attend to one another, and to the ordinary man walking in the road with them who shares with them extraordinary perspectives. They converse, they commune, they reason together. The momentary absence of the spiritual world seems to root them more firmly in the relationships given to them in the present: “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.”